Nutanix Karbon: Enterprise-grade Kubernetes Solution

Enterprises in all industries are looking more like tech companies as they rely on software to deliver value to customers and stay competitive. From airplane manufacturers leveraging software and the Internet to better predict maintenance needs to hotel operators driving customer satisfaction by helping guests avoid lines with smartphone check-in—they all require rapid development of software.

These companies are following the lead set by technology giants such as Google, Amazon, and Uber in adopting Kubernetes and containers to speed the development of software and services, increase their reliability, and simplify their operations. Kubernetes and containers help by providing a standard way of packaging and deploying software that works in the public cloud and in private data centers, keeping applications up and running, and making efficient use of computing resources.

The ultimate Kubernetes solution for on-prem

Nutanix Karbon is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes Certified distribution that simplifies the provisioning, operations and lifecycle management of Kubernetes with a native Kubernetes experience. Karbon makes it simple to deploy a highly available Kubernetes cluster and operate web-scale workloads.

Nutanix Karbon, now in tech preview, supports wizard-driven Kubernetes Deployments across AOS Clusters. Cyxtera is one of Karbon’s early Tech Preview customers and Karbon has already made a significant improvement in their business agility. According to Zach Hilliard, Senior Director of SREs, “Leveraging Nutanix Karbon, we can deploy a Kubernetes cluster in just a few minutes. Prior to Karbon, this process was complex, tedious and very time-consuming. Now, we are able to increase the business agility and serve our developer on demand with their container requests.”

1) Provision Servers or Virtual Machines to host the Masters, Workers, and etcd nodes. This is where the Kubernetes version and host OS images get selected. Karbon will maintain up to three Kubernetes versions.

2) Set up the container network for the Pods to communicate with each other. Karbon has integrated networking using Flannel with cluster-level logging using the EFK (Elastic, Fluentd, Kibana) Stack.

3) Set up the storage provider for stateful workloads. Karbon is integrated into persistent storage via Nutanix Volumes. This is all done using Nutanix Kubernetes External Provisioner Plugin.

These three easy steps result in the creation of a Kubernetes cluster ready to run stateful workloads.

Nutanix Karbon allows organizations to be more agile and efficient. More importantly, they can save the cost of hiring additional dedicated resources to manage their infrastructure, help alleviate the pain of dealing with day to day monitoring, and further assist with the uptime of the Kubernetes cluster. With Karbon, IT teams can focus on the business, increase the rate of innovation, and decrease time to market—all while developers enjoy the fast, efficient native Kubernetes experience.

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